When Google’s ride-sharing company, Waymo, sued Uber for using Waymo’s trade secrets, it used as evidence the lidar (light detection and ranging) sensor Uber was designing for its self-driving vehicles. Waymo saw the design by accident when the manufacturer (who was making the lidar systems for both Uber and Waymo) accidentally sent Waymo a mock-up of Uber’s lidar system. Although Uber claimed the design was fairly standard, Waymo alleged it was too similar to their own to be a coincidence.

According to Waymo, Uber allegedly obtained knowledge of Google’s self-driving trade secrets when they bought Otto, a self-driving truck company. Otto was founded by Anthony Levandowski, who used to work as an engineer for Google to develop their self-driving technology. Just a few months after he started Otto, his company was bought by Uber and Levandowski became an employee of Waymo’s competitor.

Waymo alleged files regarding their self-driving technology went missing from Google’s servers around the time Levandowski quit his job with Google. The fact that he started working for Uber a short time later, and that Uber’s self-driving technology looked suspiciously like their own, was enough to prompt Waymo to suspect that Levandowski leaving Google to start his own company, which was then bought by Uber, was all part of an elaborate plot for Uber to steal trade secrets from Google. Continue reading